Block Sizes in the Block Sets Conjecture

A set X is called Euclidean Ramsey if, for any k and sufficiently large n, every k-colouring of Rⁿ contains a monochromatic congruent copy of X. This notion was introduced by Erdos, Graham, Montgomery, Rothschild, Spencer and Straus. They asked if a set is Ramsey if and only if it is spherical, meaning that it lies on the surface of a sphere. It is not too difficult to show that if a set is not spherical then it is not Euclidean Ramsey either, but the converse is very much open despite extensive research over the years. On the other hand, the block sets conjecture is a purely combinatorial, Hales-Jewett type of statement, concerning `blocks in large products', introduced by Leader, Russell and Walters. If true, the block sets conjecture would imply that every transitive set (a set whose symmetry group acts transitively) is Euclidean Ramsey. As for the question above, the block sets conjecture remains very elusive, being known only in a few cases. In this paper we show that the sizes of the blocks in the block sets conjecture cannot be bounded, even for templates over the alphabet of size 3. We also show that for the first non-trivial template, namely 123, the blocks may be taken to be of size 2 (for any number of colours). This is best possible; all previous bounds were `tower-type' large.